Not First Class at all
No, just no.
I can’t understand why X-Men: First Class got so comparatively good reviews. From what I had read about it I thought I would see some really nice well written dialogues, good interaction between the main characters, a story that would engage me. I saw nothing of this. It was just a long stretch of out firework, superheroes showing off various tricks, but failing at making me care wheather they would succeed or not. Oh, and also women running around in their underwear for no good reason, reminding me of some outdated Bond moive. It might have been charming in the 60s, but now?
I couldn’t care less about those people and their destinies and I was honestly counting down, waiting for it to finish, which is something I normally don’t do in theatres.
My criticism doesn’t come from being overall negative towards the super hero genre that takes its inspiration form comics. I’m not. All movies aren’t supposed to Change Your View On Life. Some are just there to give us a couple of hours of straightforward entertainment, fair enough. For instance I enjoyed for instance The Dark Knight very much and Spider-Man was, if not as good as The Dark Knight, at least decent. But this one just didn’t catch me. I liked the previous ones better, but then again, they starred Patrick Stewart.
I suppose I might have felt differently if I had grown up on a comic diet of X-Men. Nostalgia is always powerful source of enjoyment.
A reminder
If there’s anything nice to say about it, I guess it would be that it’s somehow refreshing to see a film I genuinly dislike once in a while. It reminds me of how bad movies can be and that I shouldn’t take the high quality movies I love for granted. So from that perspective it wasn’t a complete waste of time and money.
X-Men: First Class (Vaughn,US, 2011) My rating: 2/5
The Velvet Café 
There’s something wrong with “women running around in their underwear for no good reason?” For some of us, that’s worth the price of admission! 🙂 Honestly, I can see no downside for either the underwayee or the underwearer! But that’s just me…..Oh, right, be serious….I’m trying, I swear……
SpiritusRex
July 29, 2011 at 8:27 am
*shakes fist*
🙂
Jessica
July 29, 2011 at 8:29 am
A few points.
1) In my opinion, you don’t do the old James Bond-films justice. They are unique in the thriller/action-genres in that they don’t take themselves seriously. On the contrary, the old Bond-films are ironically poking fun at themselves. Scantily clad ladies in those films are subtle parodies of scantily clad ladies in the stupid action/thriller-films from other quarters (I mean, look at their behaviour!), in the same way as James Bond himself is a subtle parody of the inane super spy/superhero-idiom. The old Bond-films are good examples of understated, ironical British humour. Latter day Bond-films completely lack this dimension, though, and have thus fallen into the trap of becoming the same kind of boring films that the older ones so successfully lampooned.
2) Your description of your reaction when seeing this film pinpoints what I meant in my comment on Winter’s Bone! For me it goes for practically all of the superhero-films, though. There are exceptions. You’ll find one of them in my review of The Dark Knight, but maybe not the one you’d expect.
3) It is never a true waste of time watching a bad film. All the films you ever see will function as a backdrop, as a set of future references, against which to compare any and all films you see. Quite naturally, I don’t mean that one conciously compares any film one sees with all the other films one has seen, but subconciously a sort of general knowledge lurks in the mind, a set of standards, let’s say, and that helps. A lot.
All the best,
Bellis
Moviehead
January 6, 2012 at 12:40 pm
You have a few good points there Bellis. I’m probably a bit harsh on Bond. It’s just that the fun-aura that surrounded them earlier in my life has faded. I figure I’m going a bit old and grumpy and tired of a lifetime of exposure to sexist stereotyping.
You also have a valid point about the value of watching bad movies. Since I mostly avoid them I get a pretty biased view on what films are like in general, not realizing that I only see a very special selection of films and nothing anywhere near the average.
And I thoroughly enjoyed The Dark Knight!
Jessica
January 6, 2012 at 3:12 pm